New Orleans’ Transcendent Cultural Ecology

If you know what it means to miss New Orleans, you need to listen to Ned Sublette celebrate the city’s marvelous musical history on Open Source with Christopher Lydon. Here’s a snatch of what he said:

Something I have learned concretely at various times in my life (most graphically after the flood that took out New Orleans in 2005) is that after a rupture, when things come back and they’re not the same, the new conditions will ultimately create new music. But in the short run, what you want is to hang on to your past. You want to find a continuity with what went before. The first thing we wanted to know after the flood was if Fats Domino was okay? Would there be a second line again? Would there be another jazz funeral? Would the Mardi Gras Indians come out on Mardi Gras Day? It was of key importance for the survival of New Orleans — not just black New Orleans, but New Orleans as a whole — that that happened. That is a small reflection of the feat that enslaved Africans accomplished in the new world pretty much everywhere they were taken…

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]